Was anyone else hoping ICS would be the end of custom skins?

I for one love the look and feel of pure AOSP. I cant STAND these custom skins the all the manufacturers put on it. HTC Sense is the only decent one out there. Blur is downright awful and disorganized. It adds and screws up features already in the OS. Touchwiz is crap and so is LGs skin. Those two are trying to look like an iPhone and are too "cartooney". Honestly, every carrier has the iPhone now, so if I wanted one i would go get it!

Unfortunately i just saw this link which shows that Samsung is STILL using touchwiz which totally defeats the purpose. It doesn't look and different and still detracts from AOSP.

Re: Was anyone else hoping ICS would be the end of custom skins?

Yes! It saddens me as well that Samsung will go out of their way to ruin their beautiful phones with TouchWiz. The business justification for skins is to differentiate the product from the sea of other Android phones, instead of making commodities. I get it, but the problem is that these hardware companies can't do a better optimization and UI job than Google. So the consumer gets ugly, and buggy experience which in turn is responsible for slow updates.

I want them to give the consumer a choice on first boot, #1 TouchWiz with a long list of "benefits", or #2 Normal Android experience. Until that happens I will stick to Nexus devices.

Many many many features of our beloved vanilla android first appeared in custom skins. It's good to see different entities attempting different things, and in the end everyone wins because google can cherry pick from others work and Android becomes better.

There's a lot of downsides too, I just felt like pointing out a good effect that custom skins has had on Android.

I knew skins would be around still, but I had hope that Google had come up with a Theme Engine-like solution. I hope soon they come up with a way for OEMs to add what they want and allow consumers to hide/disable those add-ons. And with a, theme engine, could be easier to update devices

I knew skins would be around still, but I had hope that Google had come up with a Theme Engine-like solution. I hope soon they come up with a way for OEMs to add what they want and allow consumers to hide/disable those add-ons. And with a, theme engine, could be easier to update devices

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus

Good idea! Winamp used this theory and gained huge popularity because of it. Then AOL ruined it, but that's besides the point.

I love skins, but give us a choice. And if you make a skin...update it manufacturers!!! I'm looking at you HTC!

Portions of this page are modifications based on work created and shared by the Android Open Source Project
and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution License. AndroidCentral is an independent site
that is not affiliated with or endorsed by Google.